Ana Garcia lights candles near the scene of the collision between the FedEx truck and the bus carrying high school students on the I-5, Friday, April 11, 2014, in Orland, Ca. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker/L.A. Daily News)

A sign drawn by students from the Orland bus crash thanks Glenn County at the Red Cross shelter at the Orland VFW auditorium where students from the crash spent the night, Friday, April 11, 2014. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker/L.A. Daily News)

ORLAND>> Rosa Moreno was home with her two small children when she heard what sounded like a bomb go off outside. She ran across a dirt frontage road that separates her home from a small grove of orange trees.

“It was really ugly,” she said in Spanish, describing the aftermath of Thursday night’s collision of a tour bus filled with high school students and a FedEx semi-truck. Dark clouds of smoke billowed into the bright blue sky above, and she said passengers of the bus ran across the I-5 Freeway, away from her home and the burning wreckage. “I heard it, and when I came out, everything was on fire. It was really scary,” she said.

Across the grove, in a small subdivision, Jose Inez was sitting in his backyard when he heard the noise and took off running toward the interstate.

He described a scene of devastation and chaos, as one of the victims stumbled near the burning bus and truck, in flames.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “I heard people screaming and I saw some guy coming, all of his body burning. I tried to help him, yelled at him to ‘lay down, lay down,’ and I called to my neighbor who has a fire extinguisher.”

Inez said he was having trouble thinking about anything else Friday, even while at work as a trash truck operator.

“I didn’t see the others because I was looking at him. I’ve never seen anyone burning like that, with skin coming off his body. And the tires kept popping — it was so loud.”

Inez’s daughter, Leticia, said the scene was surreal.

“It’s just so scary seeing something like that,” she said Friday.

In the tiny town, population close to 8,000, everyone was talking about the crash Friday, even as survivors began the journey home and crews worked to clean up the charred ground and remove the last of the two vehicles.

A small memorial of candles and flowers was laid along a gravel road near the scene, just beneath the yellow police tape. Shattered glass and bits of debris littered the roadside.

A rural agricultural area, the small town is the largest in Glenn County. It is quiet and rustic, with 1950s-era buildings dotting the town’s few main streets. Rivers flow nearby, and open spaces and dirt roads dot the area just outside the small downtown hub.

“I don’t think anyone in this town has seen anything like it,” Kacey Barba said of the fiery crash. “I saw it from across town, and it was coming from the direction of my house. My first thought was that it was my house.”

Barba said while the heavily-traveled interstate forms the western boundary of town, there are few accidents — and nothing of this magnitude.

“There has been nothing like this — nothing,” she said. “It’s just so sad.”

The town’s Veterans Memorial Hall — set across the street from the local high school and a baseball diamond — was turned into an American Red Cross emergency center in the hours after the collision. By Friday it was turned into a family reunification center for parents to find students who escaped unharmed.

A few remained late Friday, but declined to speak about the ordeal. Glenn County announced that it was setting up a voucher system for families of the victims to get motel rooms for the night, many having traveled up from Southern California.

Students were released from hospitals throughout the day, including Enloe Medical Center in Chico, a 30-minute drive from Orland.

“There are three patients remaining, and they are all in fair condition,” Christina Chavira, a hospital spokeswoman, said late Friday. “We don’t expect any further patients to be discharged today.

Six patients were taken to St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff. Five were released, and one person in critical condition was transferred to a burn center at UC Davis. The patient’s condition was upgraded from critical to serious but stable.

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